Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Yahoo's Cyber Monday Mess Finally Fixed

I feel bad for the thousands of small merchants who rely on Yahoo for their e-commerce services. They totally missed the anticipated sales spike on Cyber Monday, so dubbed because it is the first big day of online sales after Thanksgiving, which heralds in the holiday shopping season.

The problem with error messages coming up during checkout transactions was first reported by Yahoo to its Merchant Solutions customers around 8:30 a.m. PST on Monday.

By 6:50 p.m., the merchants were once again able to accept transactions, but the system was slow. And by 11:06 p.m., merchants were able to accept and process orders "as expected."

That's about 10 hours with no service, and then another four hours with slow service, on what is believed to be a huge online-shopping day.